We are writing to you as a group of fellow filmmakers and academics, Palestinians, Israelis and others, to thank you for your principled and courageous step of withdrawing from the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film School workshop and “implicitly” joining the cultural boycott of Israel. As admirers of your work, from Abigail’s Party to Another Year, we have long appreciated your commitment to those sectors of society that are disenfranchised and normally silenced. Now you have actively and openly intervened in defence of Palestinian rights, and we applaud you for doing so publicly.You have joined the growing ranks of artists and cultural producers who are refusing to lend their name and prestige to the cover-up of a brutal occupation, already more than four decades old.

Your action also challenges the long silence of most of Israel’s artists and intellectuals who have, unfortunately, been co-opted into the broad Israeli social coalition that supports the brutalities visited by Israel on the Palestinians. Some of those will certainly feel threatened by your stand; we feel supported by it. If a just peace is to be ever achieved in Palestine, Jews elsewhere have to stand together in support of the full rights of the Palestinians. Your action is striking evidence of growing cultural resistance abroad to Israel’s intransigence.We hope it will encourage others. Only by such concerted action will the situation change in the Middle East.